Recently, a new development in telecommunications has taken place. Systems have been developed, for example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,599,493 and 4,797,911 which automatically dial a number and then connect a live operator when the called party answers the call. For efficiency, because there are always a certain number of unanswered or busy calling connections, and because some of the numbers called are, in fact, machines, it stands to reason that an automated call placing (ACP) system can improve efficiency by attempting more calls than there are agents. To make this effective, the system should begin the call placement routine before a live operator is actually available. However, this procedure opens the possibility of an answer occurring with no available operator.
On the one hand, for the sake of economy, a system manager would like to have all of the agents busy all of the time. On the other hand, it is important in many applications to minimize the amount of time a called party is placed on hold. It is the nature of ACP systems that these two goals are mutually exclusive, that is to say: You can have 100 percent agent utilization but at the cost of lengthy customer hold time, or have no customer hold time at the cost of low agent utilization (long agent idle time). The purpose of a pacing algorithm is to allow the system operator to control one or the other of these parameters. By setting the pacing level, a system operator can make the trade-off between these parameters.
Other parameters around which systems can be controlled are the number of customers waiting for an agent; the number of disconnects on hold by answered customers; operator idle time, or perhaps the amount of time that a customer must wait on hold. None of the existing operating system set points are appropriate in all situations.
Accordingly, automated call pacing systems require a system and method of allowing the system operator to control the trade-off between attendant efficiency and customer waiting time.
One difficulty with such a system is that the statistics of the telephone network and the call receiving public are not static, i.e., the probability of an answer can change from time to time. This is compounded in that the size of the operator pool itself may change, as well as the time an operator is engaged on a particular calling connection. Therefore, this makes the above requirement even more difficult to achieve.
Accordingly, a need exists in the art for an automated call pacing system which takes into account a myriad of diverse operating conditions and allows the user to set the balance between customer hold times and operator efficiency.
A further need exists in the art for such a system which will hold the selected operating point even while other system independent variables, such as the number of operators, probability of answer and agent task time change.